Abstract

This study formulates the following relationship for identifying randomly interstratified illite/smectite using the integrated peak widths (β) for the first-order reflections after ethylene-glycolation (EG) and thermal dehydration (TD) treatments:

where pi is the proportion of interstratified illite layers. The relationship minimizes the effect of crystallite thickness on the evaluation of pi, which has been a critical source of error in the previous methods using peak position and intensity.